Email has revolutionised communications in speed and utility, but we haven't yet come to terms with the speed with which we can fall into the many pitfalls. We seem to be a society that skim-reads everything, that wants news delivered in sound-bites, and that has developed a short attention span. So, if you're still reading this, please let me explain the consequences so far as email is concerned. Skim-reading an email can mean that you completely miss the point, or that you perhaps take offence where none was intended. Replying in haste will mean you have not given enough thought to your reply or not expressed yourself carefully enough or clearly enough. Combine the two, skim-reading with hasty replies, and you have the potential to end a fruitful business relationship, or even your employment.

Here is a look at Six Deadly Sins of email

Skim-reading. Email comes flooding into most in-boxes these days, and spam filters can hardly eliminate everything, so generally we glance at the subject line to decide whether an email is junk or something we need to read. Then we decide if it is something we need to deal with immediately, or if it can be left for later. When we finally get to read the email, it is almost as if our minds are still in the "filter" mode rather than "understand". We try to get the gist of the email without slowing down and giving it enough attention. You should read each email carefully because it is such an error-prone medium. The sender might not have expressed himself clearly for a start, and you can make the wrong assumptions about what he was trying to say. With wide screens and very long lines of text you might easily miss one crucial word and get completely the opposite understanding of what was written. Re-read the email you are replying to in full before you ever send your reply.

Hasty replies. The corollary of skim-reading, a hasty reply can get you into trouble if you have chosen your words poorly, or if you have typed them badly. Omitting or misspelling crucial words can dramatically change the meaning of your email. The old adage of "act in haste, repent at leisure" is absolutely true of email if you are annoyed about something you've just read. Obviously, you should re-read your reply before you send it, but if there is any possibility you might be replying in anger you should seriously think abut not sending it at all. A useful precaution when drafting a reply is to omit or delete the address in the "To:" field. That way, if you inadvertently hit "send" it won't actually go anywhere. It might also give you pause to consider who you are sending it to when you are ready to send and you need to insert the recipient's address, ask yourself, "Do I really want to send this to him?"

Wrong recipients. There are generally two ways you can send email to the wrong people. One is by clicking on "reply to all" when you only intended the originator to read your comments. That might be the case if you are making a disparaging remark about someone who, to your misfortune, happens to be one of the other recipients. It's probably never a good idea to be disrespectful of a colleague, certainly a bad idea to do so to his face, but possibly fatal to your career if it is your boss. The other trap for the unwary is the auto-complete feature of many email programs. You start to type in the recipient's name and it fills in the rest. Just make sure it has filled-in the correct person or proprietary information can be sent outside the company.

Inappropriate content. This is the one that keeps being reported in the papers, they do love a good story about office workers getting sacked for sending each other rude jokes or revealing photos. It's hard to understand how it keeps going on though. The days when every garage workshop had walls adorned with Page Three pin-ups are long gone, as are the days when it was acceptable to tell sexist or racist jokes at work. It should therefore be obvious to everyone that the same applies to sending such material around the office email system. And that's perhaps the nub of the problem. There is an invisible dividing line between personal and private email, and work related email. Unfortunately, it should not be invisible, it should be clear and obvious to everyone. The fact that it isn't is due to the use of business email addresses for personal email, often against company policies.

Confrontational tone. One of my clients is the model of email etiquette, their communications are always punctuated with "please" and "thank you" and other niceties. It is impossible to imagine they could upset anyone. They are very wise to do that because it is amazingly easy for someone to misread your tone because essentially there is no tone. You are writing in plain black and white and if your words look harsh, they will seem harsh to the reader. That's because we use email in an almost conversational way, rather than as a written medium which it really is. So while we might phone someone up and they can hear the tone of our voice and the context of how we are using those words is clear, in an email it is not. The same phrase might be read in different ways and the chances are, if there is a wrong way, that is how it will be read. Don't take that chance. Be careful how you phrase your email and sprinkle a few smilies about the text.

Email is permanent. I guess perhaps the greatest mistake people make over email is this one. They fire off an email and they think that once it has disappeared into the ether, it is gone for good. They think email, like a phone conversation, is an ephemeral thing that only exists for a moment in time when they send it and the recipient reads it. How else do we explain the actions of those who commit to writing what they were probably unwise even to think? And then to send it to people who should never have been trusted with such confidences? As caddish boyfriends learn when a jilted lover forwards their correspondence to everyone in her address book, emails can take on a life of their own, far beyond the limits you might have imagined when you wrote it. Time and circumstances change, so what you might have once thought true might not be true years later, or even months or weeks later. Whatever you write about a project, a client, or a colleague, for example, could resurface some time later and could cause you some embarrassment or difficulty. That's perhaps the final thought on this subject: when you commit yourself to writing, you really do commit yourself.

To sum up, here are a few precautions to take before you reply;

Re-read who the sender is.
Re-read who the recipient is.
Re-read their message.
Re-read your intended reply.

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